All wireless technologies use the airwaves to transmit and receive information. To allow many different technologies to communicate simultaneously, wireless spectrum is carved up into chunks of frequency bands, with radio frequency (RF) in particular lying in the range of 3 kHz to 300 GHz. RF bands in a given area may be either licensed or unlicensed, and an enterprise may have access to both. For licensed bands, entities generally pay a fee—or otherwise obtain rights—for the exclusive rights to transmit on assigned channels of specific bands in a geographic region. In unlicensed bands, virtually anyone following particular transmission protocols may transmit data across the bands without having to pay licensing fees. Licensing is generally very impractical for certain device uses, such as for smaller wireless devices that yet remains available in most regions. However, the fact that virtually any device may transmit in unlicensed space causes interference and problems in areas with numerous wireless devices or during times of high network traffic. As wireless technologies become more prolific, enterprises—or groups of enterprises—need to manage multiple, sometimes contentious, wireless infrastructures within a given geographic area.
Wireless device traffic largely depends on the particular applications being performed on the devices in a given location. Streaming a video chat requires much more bandwidth than communicating e-mails. The frequencies an enterprise has licensed may quickly be consumed during peak hours, and services the enterprise has earmarked for the licensed frequencies may suffer interference or performance degradation if network capacity is not appropriately allocated to the wireless devices in the area.
Some enterprises have proprietary radio management solutions that manage devices within a single spectrum range. For example, wireless vendors sometimes have software that automatically assigns access points in a wireless infrastructure to different channels. Such solutions are very focused in scope to their own solution and devices. If an administrator deploys non-cooperating devices (e.g., wireless security cameras and wireless projection receivers), the two sets of devices may operate independently and unknowingly compete for the same airspace. The resultant interference may degrade the performance of groups of devices.